Digitizing the Church – Challenges for Academic Theology

“Digital church” (#DigitaleKirche) is currently much discussed. It’s inspiring (and sometimes amusing) to follow the debates about digital tools, social media, helpful apps, or the latest means of communication in all fields of ecclesiastical life. Thinking about “blessing robots,” “donation apps,” or “pastoring chat bots” is an important step to usher the church into the daily digital experience of their (potential) members. I think the church has to go that way for communicational and administrative reasons as long as digital technology supports pastoral tasks and doesn’t replace “offline” community. In this way, #DigitaleKirche is an esteem of the communicative fundamental structure of the church and, also, of the ways communication between people has changed.Besides the communicative facet of #DigitaleKirche, we must consider technological progress. For years, pastoral offices and church leadership administrate their areas computerized with databases, administrative software, digital Bible editions. Some regional churches even offer mailing servers like “Exchange” for all their pastors to synchronize mails, contacts, calendars between the office, private computers, and smartphones. I could endlessly proceed the list of digital facilities the church uses for an internal use of communication with their stuff. In these fields, church is already highly digital!

In all of these “digital cases” of the #DigitaleKirche, you must not forget the challenges which arise for academic theology. Digitization of the church brings specific problems for theological research which concerns – in my opinion – at least three dimensions:

The ethical dimension of a #DigitaleKirche is constituted in an original field of theology. Scholars and practicians have to ask how far digitization should go. As I mentioned above, tools should support, not replace. For sure, we are not talking about a “digital faith” or a “web-only-church” either. But the deep ethical interest should be to reflect on applying “digital” in a useful and fruitful way.

This leads to the practical dimension of #DigitaleKirche and the genuine interests of the practical theology. “Digital” enriches religious education, homiletics, but also empiric research in an unprecedented way. During this semester, my colleague Christopher Nunn provides a course for teachers and educational students, where they collect didactical ideas using digital methods in religious education (he will introduce some results in another post). Analyzing sermons is another great opportunity for the use of digital methods. For the upcoming semester, we initialize a course in co-operation with computational linguistics to find indications of a specific language in sermons. We also think about topic modelling, collocation analyses, gender specific language, etc. The empiric research is not to be underestimated either. Can you imagine discourse, twitter, or social media analyses about the public perception of churches? I think in these cases, data and digital analyses are a rich treasure of source, which could deepen insights for church leadership and administration.

The aspect of digital analyses is tangent to the third dimension: a methodological dimension of #DigitaleKirche. Here the old questions of the relation between church and (academic) theology come up. I cannot offer a solution for that question, but I can point out what could happen if the theological disciplines changed their “digital strategies.” It shouldn’t be forgotten that a theologian was the “inventor” of “digital humanities.” In 1946, the Index Thomisticus was the first project of computing scholars (in co-operation with IBM), which created a concordance as database of the complete works of Thomas Aquinas.

The computational techniques changed during the last 70 years, as well as the digitized source materials. Now, theology, biblical studies, dogmatics, church history, and any other text-based sciences have the great opportunity to refer to the roots of Digital Humanities and to use their techniques again, or maybe better: the methods of computing historians, linguists, classicist etc. Wouldn’t it be rewarding if theologians could look at the Bible or theological/historical texts in a different and additional (methodic) light? For sure, nobody can predict that we will gain spectacular new insights. But I’m sure, we will win new arguments for a deeper analysis of theological and ecclesiastical habits.

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This is a private blog written by Stefan Karcher and Christopher Nunn, initiators of InFoDiTex.

The Interdisciplinary Forum of Digital Text Sciences at the University of Heidelberg is an open meeting for (junior) researchers in all fields of Digital Humanities. It was founded by doctoral students who meet every month during the semester turn for an informal exchange about theories and methods of digital text analysis and their own projects. On our blog we will share some impulses of the discussions at InFoDiTex.

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